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The guillotine has an image problem, but you can say this for it: even in today’s deeply hollowed out America, someone somewhere can probably still make a sharp blade.

The same cannot be said for sodium thiopental, an anesthetic used in execution by lethal injection. Since 2010, when the last American manufacturer Hospira decided to stop production, the consequences for the U.S. prison system have become increasingly embarrassing. Some U.S. execution chambers have already run out of both sodium thiopental and a substitute known as pentobarbital. Many others are expected to do so within a year.

The crisis is so acute that various commentators, not least John Kruzel and Andrew Sullivan, have called for the return of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s macabre, if relatively humane, eighteenth century method of despatch.

The world suffers no absolute short of sodium thiopental because the drug has mainstream medical applications and is believed to be still made in, among other places, the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, and Germany. But the U.S. prison service is not the sort of customer a European pharmaceutical company boasts of serving, and one by one makers like H. Lundbeck of Denmark and Naari of Switzerland have cited the Hippocratic Oath in turning away orders.

Lethal injection table (Photo credit: Ken Piorkowski)

The result has been an increasingly desperate – and humiliating – scramble. Arizona State Prison even reached out to a tiny backstreet drug distributor in London but the deal was foiled by Maya Foa, an investigator for the London-based anti-capital punishment non-profit Reprieve.

To cap it all, then U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke had his face memorably slapped when he joined the chase. He appealed directly to German Economics Minister Philipp Rösler but, far from collaborating in some subterfuge, Rösler reflexively rejected the request, and then lobbied successfully for an E.U.-wide ban on supplying U.S. death chambers. (In a pattern typical of the way the global news business works these days, this episode was ignored in America. The German press was less restrained. Click here for an English-language translation of how the German magazine Der Spiegel covered the story.)

I happen to oppose the death penalty but let’s leave ethics out of it: there is an economics story here of first-order importance. Sodium thiopental is clearly a sophisticated product that requires advanced manufacturing skills.

Otherwise European manufacturers, some of whom pay wage rates up to 40 percent higher than American levels, would not continue to produce it. The drug is typical of a wide range of advanced products that are no longer made in the United States – products that in the fullness of time the United States will probably lose all ability to make. (Advanced manufacturing knowhow is acquired through years or even decades of learning-by-doing and once lost is difficult or impossible to reacquire.)

To say the least, if the world trade system were working as advertised, America’s failure to produce the drug would seem surprising. In reality, of course, there is no surprise. As some of us have been pointing out for decades, world markets are a stacked deck in which Uncle Sam's appointed role is as patsy.

A key problem is the prevalence of non-tariff barriers. While such barriers are difficult to document in any particular instance (and there may possibly be some other explanation in the case of thiopental), the overall pattern is clear: foreign non-tariff barriers are a fundamental reason why in virtually every category of manufactured product the United States has long been losing market share – in many cases to the point where it has already entirely exited the business.

Meanwhile the United States continues interminably to run vast current account deficits and goes ever deeper into debt to surplus nations -- not least to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark.